Triumphales were an extraordinary achievement of Roman historical re-
construction and the backbone of many modern studies of the cere-
mony’s history, to be sure. But how accurate a document is it? To what
extent is a (more than symbolic) chronology of Roman triumphal cele-
Constructions and Reconstructions
73
brations within our grasp—whether we rely on this inscribed text or on
the records transmitted by historians such as Livy?
Suppose we were faced with an inscribed list—from Westminster Ab-
bey, maybe—of English monarchs from King Arthur to Elizabeth II,
each reign precisely dated and its major achievements summarized. At
either end of such a roster we would have little difficulty in assessing the
historicity of the kings and queens concerned. The status of Queen Vic-
toria (1837–1901) or even Edward VIII (whose brief “reign” in 1936
would have posed its own problems to the compilers of the list) is of an
entirely different order from that of King Arthur. Whatever shadowy
historical character or characters may, or may not, lie behind the story of
the Lord of the Round Table, there is no doubt that he is exactly that—a
story, an ideological fiction, a mythical ancestor of English kings and
kingship.
So too with the roster of triumphing generals inscribed in the Roman
Forum. It would be perverse to be too skeptical about the general ac-
curacy of the triumphal record of the last two centuries bce, which
amounts to well over a hundred ceremonies in all. Even if the details of
these occasions were embellished, invented, or disputed by historians in
antiquity, we usually have no good cause to doubt the occurrence of the
recorded triumphs, some of which—such as Pompey’s in 61—are docu-
mented in a wide variety of different sources and media. Nor is it likely
in this period that any celebration has fallen out of the record (though
later, after 19 bce, where we rely almost entirely on now-patchy literary
accounts, some ceremonies have almost certainly been lost to us, even if
for a time they retained a place in Roman memory).
Conversely, it would be just as perverse not to be skeptical about the
historicity of the earliest triumphs recorded, in the mythical period of
the foundation of the city and its more or less legendary early kings. The
triumph of Romulus that opens the Fasti Triumphales certainly played
an important role in the symbolic history of the ceremony, much as the
reign of King Arthur does in the symbolic history of British kingship.
But no one would now imagine that it could be pinned down to a par-
ticular historical occasion or real-life honorand. Besides, the differences
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
7 4
between ancient writers in their reconstructions of the early history of
the triumph reinforce the sense of a fluidity in the tradition. Livy’s
Romulus does not triumph, for example (though he does dedicate the
spolia opima after killing the enemy commander, Acro); Dionysius of
Halicarnassus’ Romulus does—not just once but, as in the inscribed
Fasti, three times.1 Indeed, by and large Dionysius’ chronology in his
Antiquitates Romanae (Roman Antiquities) is much closer to the Fasti
than Livy, but even he, significantly or not, omits any mention of the
two triumphs of the last king, Tarquin the Proud, that have a place on
the inscription.2
The more difficult problem lies not in identifying the clearly mythi-
cal, and the equally obviously historical, examples but in how to draw a
line between them. In the English case, this would be the “King Alfred
dilemma,” a monarch caught in that difficult territory between “myth”
and “history” (a bona fide ruler of the late ninth century, maybe, but
hardly the founder of the British navy or absent-minded dreamer who
burnt the peasant’s cakes in anything but legend). So where in the list of
triumphs does myth stop and history start? How far back in time can
we imagine that the compilers of the inscribed Fasti, or other histori-
ans working in the late Republic and early Empire, had access to accu-
rate information on exactly who triumphed, when and over whom?
And if they had access to it, did they use it? To what extent were they
engaged in fictionalizing reconstruction, if not outright invention? This
is the kind of dilemma that hovers over most of our attempts to write
about early (and not so early) Rome. Why believe what writers of the
first century bce or later tell us? Or, to push the argument back a step, how
trustworthy were the historical accounts composed in the third or second
centuries bce, now largely lost to us, on which the later writers relied?
Modern critics have generally divided into two opposing camps on
these questions, or hesitated awkwardly between them. On the one
hand stand the optimists, who argue that the traditions of archival and
other forms of record-keeping were well enough, and early enough, es-
tablished at Rome for reasonably reliable data to be available for even a
period as remote as the last phases of the monarchy in the sixth century
Constructions and Reconstructions
75
bce; and that some of this information, whether transmitted through
priestly records (the notorious Annales Maximi, for example), family his-
tories, or traditional ballads, was incorporated into the historical narra-
tive that survives.
On the other hand are the skeptics who not only doubt the existence,
or (if it existed) the usefulness, of the supposed archival tradition but
also question the process by which any early “information” was trans-
mitted to the later historical narrative. It was not a matter of wholesale
one-off invention. But over time, so this argument runs, the repeated at-
tempts of Roman historians to systematize such fragmentary evidence as
they had and to massage it into a well-ordered series of events and mag-
istracies, combined with the powerful incentive to elevate the achieve-
ments of the ancestors of families prominent in later periods, drastically
compromised the accuracy of the Romans’ view of their early history.3
As Cicero summed it up, the “invented triumphs and too many consul-
ships” with which leading families glamorized their own past distorted
the Roman historical tradition.4
INVENTED TRIUMPHS?
It is no easier to resolve this historiographical dilemma in the case of the
triumph than in the case of any Roman institution. Leaving aside what-
ever information may have been recorded in Roman archives, we cer-
tainly have evidence of a range of public documents specifically associ-
ated with triumphal celebrations. On an optimistic reading, these might
underpin the accuracy of the triumphal chronology. A scholar of the
first century ce, for example, discussing a particular form of archaic
Latin verse, refers to “the ancient tablets which generals who were going
to celebrate a triumph used to put up on the Capitoline”; and he quotes
lines (in the so-called “Saturnian” meter which is his subject) from two
of them, vaunting the military success of generals who triumphed in 190
and 189 bce.5 Likewise, Cicero implies that scrupulous generals submit-
ted accounts that were filed away in the state treasury (and, in principle
at least, retrievable from it)—accounts that noted not only the quantity